# Ditto's Docks' new ad thread



## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

​Ditto's Docks v.3 A Ditto themed website. What could be better than that?

It still looks the same as v.2, but the layout is DIV based, instead of the old tables. I've re-arranged the navigation so the menu's are about the same length. There aren't a whole bunch of new pages, but I do have some (as of now) out of date information about HG and SS. One perk to go with this is that I've included some speculation. 

I have some fan theories about the workings of things, you can see a gallery of my sprites, read a few tutorials, play some of the games available, enter a funny caption contest, view visitor submitted art and possibly submit your own.

We have a good looking forum that is hosted on our own server, powered by PHP BB3, and I now have about 500 smilies, and 4 styles. I have my own, possibly humorous (I couldn't tell you) blog, with a description of the more interesting things that happen in my life.

Currently, I only have one style up for the style switcher, but ideally there will be 7, and gaining more.  On a related note (but obscurely) if you can guess from what Pokemon the chatbox got it's colors, you will be granted with a cookie. =)

I hope you visit DD (as it is abbreviated) and enjoy it. Or if you don't, tell me why, here.

[url=http://ditto.ifastnet.com/phpBB3][/url]​


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## Departure Song (Jun 24, 2009)

> You will also need SSI and Javascript for optimal viewing of the site.


I giggled. You do know what SSI stands for, don't you?


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Yeah, server side includes, and some browsers don't support it.


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## Departure Song (Jun 24, 2009)

Oh, really? Like which? ;)


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Umm, really old ones that I don't think anyone uses anymore, but you never know.


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## Butterfree (Jun 24, 2009)

It is not theoretically possible for a browser not to support SSI. They are _server_-side includes; the _server_ pastes the include files into the .shtml file _before_ the page is sent to the browser. No browser will ever know that your menus aren't actually in the file it thinks it's fetching.

Since the server does the work, it is the server (i.e. your web host) that needs to support it, not the client (i.e. the browser).


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Oh, ok. I'll take that off! I think I might have heard about that when somebody was talking about on their own system.


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## Sandstone-Shadow (Jun 24, 2009)

I don't have a lot of time to look at the content, but I do have a few tips I can give you about the layout. First of all, the diagonal stripes in the menus make the text really hard to read. If you really want those there, they should be made much fainter so they don't detract from the text. Actually, all of the diagonal stripes are a little harsh; in my opinion they could all be toned down a little bit. =) I might have more to say later, but right now I'm out of time. =(


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Would a larger text size work too? The stripes are pretty much set in stone. =(


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## Sandstone-Shadow (Jun 24, 2009)

A larger text size and/or bolded font might help, too. But I'm not saying get rid of the stripes; just toning them down a little would make things better. Try using an image like this; it's the same one that you're using, but I added a white layer over the stripes so they would be lighter. (If you like it you can use it; I don't care.)

Edit: And, taking a quick look at your content, it would be nice if you put the tutorials right on the menu for easy access, instead of having a page with submenus. Not only would they be easier to access, but it lets visitors quickly see about how much content your site has. =) The same goes for the Submissions page, and any other page with submenus. And it's also kind of a pet peeve of mine when there's pages for things like fanfics and fanart, but all the page says is, "No one has submitted yet, click here to submit!" Just my opinion. xD;


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Sound advice. I think I will steal your image too! =]


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## Ivy Newton (Jun 24, 2009)

Erm... McAfee SiteAdvisor yelled at me when I tried to go there 'cause tests had shown browser security breaches or something like that.


That's probably not a good thing.


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

One of my friends had said the same thing, that the page wouldn't load, a virus report showed up or something and so on.

I have contacted Ifastnet about this problem. Here, take a look. 


> On of my friends in real-life went to check out the new features on my site, since I just recently moved from Freewebs to ifastnet as a host. However, he said that his browser wouldn't even load my website. He also mentioned something about viruses. Could you please provide some information about this? Also, is there anyway that I could remove the ads that you placed on my pages? If not, is there a way to make them smaller/move them to a different location? Thanks


They replied:


> Please confirm / or try ;
> 
> 1)clear your browser cookies/and cache, and clear your local DNS:
> 
> ...


That's really all I can add.


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## Ivy Newton (Jun 24, 2009)

It's not that it wouldn't let me go, I was just scared to go after it told me that 'cause I'm a worrywart.


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## Diz (Jun 24, 2009)

Well, as far as I know, there aren't any viruses on my site.

Does McAfee SiteAdvisor have a 'report evil site of doom' feature on it? Because it may have been that somebody did add a virus to their website hosted by iFastnet, and then a person with McAfee might have reported it, and now the thing freaks out at sites hosted by them.


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## Sandstone-Shadow (Jun 25, 2009)

I got something similar; I can't remember exactly what the report said, but I closed down the internet and ran a scan on my whole computer; AVG didn't find anything, so...


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## Diz (Jun 25, 2009)

Your internet _browser?_

*cowers* It's not my fault, I swear!


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## surskitty (Jun 25, 2009)

Why exactly is this layout fixed-width?  That's always a terrible plan.  At least you centered it, though.

Please get rid of the stripes on the sidebars: they're really, really distracting.  I zoomed out of the page to get the text size to legible instead of huge and they're less of an issue, but now the fixed-width layout takes up about a third of the screen at most.  Complete waste of space.  Really thick borders are ugly, too: why do you have them?

Remove some of the space between the headings on the sidebars and what the headings refer to.

Your Cbox has quite possibly the ugliest colour scheme ever known.

You spelled Zapdos "Zapdose" on your Pokemon of the Month page and everything there could be found on Psypoke or frequently Veekun.  Why have it?

I am _really bothered_ by things where people go on and on and on about NOT STEALING THEIR IMAGES but don't even have the decency to say that they're editing things drawn by other people.  They're not your sprites or icons.  They're sprites and icons that you edited from other people's art and the edits are yours.  The sprites themselves?  _Not really_.


Why do you have an Other People's Sprites section?  Why not just have a place where you link to other people's galleries if you have to go with that at all?


Your marquee page is very boring.  Also, congratulations: it's exceedingly easy to skip by hitting "view source" and scrolling.  ... it's still boring and I don't see why anyone would WANT to, but it's easily doable.

Your "Catch a Ditto!" thing still has _ears_.


Why does your GIMP animation tutorial assume that one is using Windows?

Why are you crossing out links instead of commenting out lines?


To be honest, you seem to have exactly no original content that anyone would want to read.


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## Diz (Jun 25, 2009)

The chatbox is supposed to look like Ho-oh



> Why do you have an Other People's Sprites section? Why not just have a place where you link to other people's galleries if you have to go with that at all?


Some people still sprite even though they don't have websites to put them on.



> Your marquee page is very boring. Also, congratulations: it's exceedingly easy to skip by hitting "view source" and scrolling. ... it's still boring and I don't see why anyone would WANT to, but it's easily doable.


And viewing the source would _kinda _ruin the fun of waiting to get an award and seeing what I have provided to make you wait. 


> You spelled Zapdos "Zapdose" on your Pokemon of the Month page and everything there could be found on Psypoke or frequently Veekun. Why have it?


Typo. Thanks for pointing it out. If you notice, at the bottom of the page I have mentioned that every thing is _from _Psypoke and the PoTM is meant as a way for my visitors to interact with me and learn a bit about their favorite of the four pokemon I listed.


> Why are you crossing out links instead of commenting out lines?


I want people to know that the page is still there but I have to re-do it.


> Your "Catch a Ditto!" thing still has _ears_.


Do you want to go through all that Javasript and remove the _ears?_ that nobody except it seems _you _care about?


> Why does your GIMP animation tutorial assume that one is using Windows?


I didn't know that the procedure is different for a different OS. I also wouldn't have a clue about how to do it in any other OS.


> I zoomed out of the page to get the text size to legible instead of huge and they're less of an issue, but now the fixed-width layout takes up about a third of the screen at most. Complete waste of space. Really thick borders are ugly, too: why do you have them?
> 
> Remove some of the space between the headings on the sidebars and what the headings refer to.


DD v 3.0 is still partially in the trial stage, so things like the size of the text on my left and right menus are subject to change.


> Why exactly is this layout fixed-width?  That's always a terrible plan.  At least you centered it, though.


Could you please tell me how to make it non-fixed width with the current page setup?


> I am _really bothered_ by things where people go on and on and on about NOT STEALING THEIR IMAGES but don't even have the decency to say that they're editing things drawn by other people. They're not your sprites or icons. They're sprites and icons that you edited from other people's art and the edits are yours. The sprites themselves? _Not really_.


I assume that you mean my sprites page, since you didn't say. However, I did spend quite a lot of time on all of those, and somebody taking credit for my time and work is not something any artist would look forward too. 

Leonardo Da Vinci didn't create humans, he just painted one, and yet we aren't annoyed by the Mona Lisa.


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## Departure Song (Jun 25, 2009)

surskitty is on her DS at the moment, but she would like to remind you that Da Vinci painted well.


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## ultraviolet (Jun 25, 2009)

Whenever I click the link to your website I get either a blank tab in Firefox or 'this page cannot be displayed' in IE. :/
I have no idea why this is, it's never done this before. 
So um. :|


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## Diz (Jun 25, 2009)

Departure Song said:


> surskitty is on her DS at the moment, but she would like to remind you that Da Vinci painted well.


That's beside the point.

It seemed to work for everybody else, so...Maybe trying to type the URL in your self would work. http://ditto.ifastnet.com


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## surskitty (Jun 25, 2009)

_Ditto_ said:


> The chatbox is supposed to look like Ho-oh


Then don't use a really dark red.  Also, that's still ugly.





> Some people still sprite even though they don't have websites to put them on.


So?  They've probably got sprite threads on some forum or another.  You could link to those.





> And viewing the source would _kinda _ruin the fun of waiting to get an award and seeing what I have provided to make you wait.


I have marquees disabled as a rule of thumb.  So do a lot of other people.  What you wrote, though, wouldn't be entertaining anyway.  If it's boring when I'm not waiting for it to scroll past at an arbitrary text speed, then why should it be entertaining when I _am_?





> If you notice, at the bottom of the page I have mentioned that every thing is _from _Psypoke and the PoTM is meant as a way for my visitors to interact with me and learn a bit about their favorite of the four pokemon I listed.


They probably _already know all of that_ and why not just link to Psypoke instead of regurgitating the same information over and over?





> I want people to know that the page is still there but I have to re-do it.


But it's not actually there.





> Do you want to go through all that Javasript and remove the _ears?_ that nobody except it seems _you _care about?


 Why the fuck do you have it if you're not going to make it actually look like what you're claiming it is?





> I didn't know that the procedure is different for a different OS. I also wouldn't have a clue about how to do it in any other OS.


You mentioned "My Pictures".  It's not necessarily called that in non-Windows.





> DD v 3.0 is still partially in the trial stage, so things like the size of the text on my left and right menus are subject to change.


Then change it and get rid of the stripes.  You don't actually need gradient backgrounds anyway; if it's too difficult to edit the stripes out for some reason, just go with solid colours.





> Could you please tell me how to make it non-fixed width with the current page setup?


Go look it up yourself.





> I assume that you mean my sprites page, since you didn't say. However, I did spend quite a lot of time on all of those, and somebody taking credit for my time and work is not something any artist would look forward too.


You're still stressing that the sprites are yours when there's very little you actually did with it.  Did you draw the actual sprites?  In most cases there, _no_; you edited somebody else's image and didn't actually mention that you did so.





> Leonardo Da Vinci didn't create humans, he just painted one, and yet we aren't annoyed by the Mona Lisa.


He actually painted his art; he didn't take other people's paintings and trace over them then declare that it's HIS, DAMMIT.

He also did a damn good job of it.


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## Butterfree (Jun 26, 2009)

> You're still stressing that the sprites are yours when there's very little you actually did with it. Did you draw the actual sprites? In most cases there, no; you edited somebody else's image and didn't actually mention that you did so.


Oh, come on. It is perfectly fine to simply assume by default that _Pokémon_ fans know what the official _Pokémon_ sprites look like and are aware that splices are made by taking parts of official sprites and pasting them together and so on. It's not just "somebody else's image"; it's an image universally recognized as being Game Freak's. There is really no need to go all frothing at the mouth because he doesn't bother to mention what is already completely obvious and inferred. :/ (Also, whether the artist is any good _is_ irrelevant; you may find it humorous to go "LOL WELL HE COULD DRAW" but it is logicfail and makes kittens cry. :()

That said, surskitty is generally right and you ought to listen to her. I mentioned the eye-hurt potential of the scanline pattern when you asked for affiliation in January; why are you so adamant to keep it? I also mentioned that the raise-a-Pikachu game's face doesn't look a thing like a Ditto. If you absolutely must have this stupid old game and can't be bothered to edit it, then why don't you at least keep the name as "Raise a Pikachu"? You can't call it "Raise a Ditto" if the thing you're raising is clearly not a Ditto, and you can't use "but I can't be bothered to edit it!" as an excuse. :/

(Also, why in the world do you want your saybox to look like Ho-oh? It's eye-hurting. The colors look good on Ho-oh; not so good on a saybox.)


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## Diz (Jun 26, 2009)

Butterfree said:


> Oh, come on. It is perfectly fine to simply assume by default that _Pokémon_ fans know what the official _Pokémon_ sprites look like and are aware that splices are made by taking parts of official sprites and pasting them together and so on. It's not just "somebody else's image"; it's an image universally recognized as being Game Freak's. There is really no need to go all frothing at the mouth because he doesn't bother to mention what is already completely obvious and inferred. :/ (Also, whether the artist is any good _is_ irrelevant; you may find it humorous to go "LOL WELL HE COULD DRAW" but it is logicfail and makes kittens cry. :()


Thank you for that.



> That said, surskitty is generally right and you ought to listen to her. I mentioned the eye-hurt potential of the scanline pattern when you asked for affiliation in January; why are you so adamant to keep it?


After it's become public demand, I'm working on fixing it. Same with the space between the link titles and actual links.



> I also mentioned that the raise-a-Pikachu game's face doesn't look a thing like a Ditto. If you absolutely must have this stupid old game and can't be bothered to edit it, then why don't you at least keep the name as "Raise a Pikachu"? You can't call it "Raise a Ditto" if the thing you're raising is clearly not a Ditto, and you can't use "but I can't be bothered to edit it!" as an excuse. :/


I heard you, and I'll work on it.



> (Also, why in the world do you want your saybox to look like Ho-oh? It's eye-hurting. The colors look good on Ho-oh; not so good on a saybox.)


It's to go with Heart Gold and Soul Silver, and I'm going to have a Lugia themed style... I'm just wondering, did you see it when it was dark red? I changed it earlier today, to better match Ho-oh's color scheme.


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## Pikachu (Jun 26, 2009)

It's still pretty eye-hurting, especially where you type your message. Plus those yellow links on a white background! :dead:

And why are all your pages PHP pages? I don't think there's any PHP on your site except for that Cutenews.


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## Diz (Jun 26, 2009)

The PHP includes....


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## Pikachu (Jun 26, 2009)

You could have easily used SSI, without the need of PHP includes.


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## Ivy Newton (Jun 27, 2009)

Pikachu said:


> You could have easily used SSI, without the need of PHP includes.


Why does it matter, exactly?


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## Diz (Jun 27, 2009)

Just bringing this up again for a sec..



surskitty said:


> You're still stressing that the sprites are yours when there's very little you actually did with it. Did you draw the actual sprites? In most cases there, _no_; you edited somebody else's image and didn't actually mention that you did so.He actually painted his art; he didn't take other people's paintings and trace over them then declare that it's HIS, DAMMIT.
> 
> He also did a damn good job of it.


I DO have down at the bottom of the page in really big letters so you won't miss it:
Pokemon, Pikachu, a_nd all other pokemon characters are copyrighted...by NINTENDO...
_


surskitty said:


> Go look it up yourself.


So you complain about something, and when somebody asks about how to fix it you can't be bothered to tell them how?


> Error: No keyboard detected.
> Press any key to continue.


I worked on making the Scan lines less irritating. How do they look now?

I also fixed the ears on the Raise A Ditto.

The Chat Box's colors are now from Lugia, and I hope they aren't eye-hurty...


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## #1 bro (Jun 27, 2009)

The "click here" page was clever, but the "disguising a link as a non-link" thing isn't working for me. I'm using Firefox 3. And it has worked on other sites, so I dunno what the problem is. :\


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## Diz (Jun 27, 2009)

Yeah, I still have to work out some CSS errors.


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## Sandstone-Shadow (Jun 27, 2009)

_Ditto_ said:


> I worked on making the Scan lines less irritating. How do they look now?


Quite honestly, it looks exactly the same as before... =/



> The Chat Box's colors are now from Lugia, and I hope they aren't eye-hurty...


They look much better. =D

And I see that you got rid of the submenus and blank pages; that's good. =3 It looks a lot more organized like that.


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## Diz (Jun 27, 2009)

Sandstone-Shadow said:


> Quite honestly, it looks exactly the same as before... =/


Actually, that's because it is. Stupidbucket and brain farts don't mix well.


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## Sandstone-Shadow (Jun 27, 2009)

That looks much better. =) I'd reccommend toning down the banner and disclaimer in the same way, but the menus are much easier to read now, and that's good. Though, it could still be toned down just a little bit more if you were willing to.


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## Diz (Jun 30, 2009)

I have the styleswitcher working now, so you can choose to use Shiny Ditto Style, which looks _really_ good with the Chat box. I realize that the text is small, and I'm working on it...


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## Pikachu (Jun 30, 2009)

You do realize that you need a default style?


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## Diz (Jun 30, 2009)

Working....


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## Diz (Jul 15, 2009)

Bump.

Also, the styleswitcher is working, finally. Those things must hate me.

I've written a new theory, on Pokerus, but I haven't linked to it. 

I've added two new styles to the forums, and around 500 smilies.

I've edited the first post to account for that, and added a banner for the forums.


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## Pii (Aug 9, 2009)

Hi Ditto :) Nice site! Wonder who am I? Torosiken from SPPF or Achamo~Torchic on my own site ^^;


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## Diz (Aug 9, 2009)

Oh hai!....


Um. Yeah....I've kinda shut down, so there won't be anymore updates to DD, but I'm leaving it up for people to enjoy.

Yeah.

Mods, feel free to close this thread, as DD doesn't need anymore advertisement


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